The Coretex Athletic Review

We often hear that “you never forget how to ride a bike.” But in sport, that saying hides an important qualifier. In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review , Evan Kurylo examines a recent 2025 meta-analytic review on procedural skill retention and decay to explore what actually happens to athletic skills during periods of non-use or intermittent use. Rather than asking whether skills disappea...

Are goaltenders really “wired differently”? Are defensemen calmer by nature? Are forwards inherently more volatile? In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review , I examine a peer-reviewed study that puts long-standing hockey stereotypes under the microscope—not by testing performance or brain activity, but by exploring how players perceive each other . Using a social-psychology lens, this episo...

Elite sport moves fast. Athletes can be central figures in their sport one season and largely absent from the competitive conversation only a few years later. This episode explores what happens not just after sport ends , but what is quietly happening during an athlete’s prime that shapes how difficult the transition becomes. Using a recent doctoral dissertation by Amanda Workman-Vickers (2025, We...

Basketball, Goalies, and Perception–Action Asymmetries Why might basketball be a useful complementary sport for hockey goaltenders? In this episode, I explore that question through the lens of perception , not conditioning or skill transfer in the traditional sense. The discussion starts with multi-sport participation and why transfer appears more likely when sports share similar perceptual proble...

Quiet Eye Isn’t Quiet | How Elite Athletes Actually See We tend to think of vision as clear, continuous, and camera-like. In reality, it’s fragmented, selective, and heavily constructed by the brain. In this episode, I explore how elite athletes use their eyes under pressure — and why traditional “Quiet Eye” explanations fall short when applied to fast, open sports like hockey. Using a landmark on...

In this episode, I examine how athletes learn skills by watching others—and why perfect demonstrations may not always be the most effective teaching tool. I review a research study that explores whether learners benefit more from observing a flawless expert, or from watching someone make mistakes and correct them in real time. The findings have important implications for coaching, teaching, and sk...

In this episode, host Evan Kurylo revisits The Mundanity of Excellence (1989) by sociologist Daniel F. Chambliss — an ethnographic study of Olympic-level swimmers that challenges how we think about talent, hard work, and athlete development. Rather than framing excellence as the result of dramatic breakthroughs, rare talent, or cutting-edge methods, Chambliss shows that elite performance emerges f...

This episode explores how athletes make sense of fast, chaotic game environments using internal models, priors, and pattern recognition. Through the lens of Bayesian reasoning and Piaget’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation, we break down why anticipation is a skill, why young athletes often lag in perceptual processing, and why predictable drills don’t transfer well into games. A practica...

Episode 1 — The Birthplace Effect: Population Size, Relative Age, and the Hidden Ecology of Talent This episode reviews the landmark 2006 study by Côté et al. examining how birthplace population and birthdate influence elite athlete emergence across the NHL, MLB, NBA, and PGA. Topics covered: Why the strongest athlete representation comes from cities of 50,000–100,000 Effect size comparisons: birt...